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It is also important to remember that evolution works like any other aspect of real life, in that not everything progresses or progresses at the same speed. It's just like at work: some employees may suddenly excel, soaring through the corporate ranks while others may be in the same position doing the same old thing as long as they're there. Some even get demoted. Not everything moves in the same pace or in the same direction, and some don't seem to change much at all.
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From the creationist's perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That's right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That's it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin' magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation scientist.
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If you say you believe in God, but you don't really believe in God, then how you could you possibly be trying to fool God? Wouldn't you have to believe there is a god if you're going to try and deceive him? And what is the deception? Are you trying to trick God into thinking you believe in him? If you don't believe in God then that's not even possible. So already the Qur'an reveals sufficient absurdity to prove that it cannot have been authored by any god. Seriously, could this be any less ridiculous if it were written in Arabic?
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Having actually read all of the Commandments listed from Exodus 20 through Exodus 34 (and many of the other Commandments strewn about the Old Testament), it is obvious that anyone who uses them as a moral guide would be a criminal in every country on this planet. The Bible does not promote morality; it only commands obedience to an amoral, oppressive and unjustly enforced belief system.
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The idea that certain races (or species) are 'higher' or 'lower' was not Darwin's idea but the universal language of all prior naturalists since forever. Darwin acknowledges this, but does not contribute to it, other than to suggest that Caucasians are not the ultimate form of mankind.
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There are eleven Commandments just in Exodus 20, and that list continues into the next three chapters, with many being ethnospecific and limited to the regional currency of sheep and shekels. It wasn't even relevant then and it has no parallel in the American legal system now, especially since we've freed the slaves, allowed women their own agency, and defied the Commandments by rejecting theocracy, permitting freedom of religion and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, creed or national heritage.
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While I don't like to encourage nationalism, I must admit that I feel... patriotic with regard to the ideals that the Founding Fathers had and on which this country was founded. I just wish that my fellow Americans knew more of our own history and of earlier European history to know what those ideals actually were.
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We can tell murder is wrong because we have objective criteria by which we can determine for certain whether murder is wrong, and we can do that regardless of what mood the gods are in nowadays. There has to be an objectively verifiable reason why something is moral or immoral, or else no one could know whether it is, including God, since the Bible has Him changing His mind all the time. Without that criteria, you couldn't know what is moral or immoral either; you just have to trust whatever the people said who pretended to speak for God.
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If you can't show that it's true, then you can't call it truth. Knowledge is similar to truth in that it a justified belief. Knowledge is demonstrable and testable with measurable accuracy. If you can't demonstrate your knowledge to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then you don't actually know what you think you do, no matter how convinced of it you are. Without evidentiary support, then it is only an empty assertion unworthy of serious consideration.
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[According to the Qur'an] God will punish me for not believing even though it is his fault that I don't believe. God doesn't need to seal my heart and my ears or cover my eyes. How about providing something that I could see or hear that would actually indicate a god? Why does God demand faith in lieu of evidence? I think it's not just that there is no evidence, but that the reason there isn't is because there is no god either.
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So the failure of scripture to describe anything accurately is obfuscated by assuming the conclusion with confirmation bias. Once again it is God who leads the unbelievers astray, and not their desire to understand the world as it is. And even though several of the world's richest and most successful, and even the most charitable people are unbelievers, they are still considered losers. Of course the Qur'an is wrong about all these things, and I'm glad to be back in a country where I am allowed to say that. But those are the sort of lies that religion needs to sell itself.
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You can believe whatever you like. As long as you admit that it is a belief, you don't have to defend it. But if you assert your belief as a statement of fact, then you do have to defend it! Stating anything as definitely true when there is insufficient evidence to back it –is dishonest. Making such positive proclamations without any evidence at all is a matter of faith. And promising in advance to forever defend an unsupportable a priori preference even against an avalanche of evidence against it -is apologetics, which is all creation science really is.
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Even after the part with the Ten Commandments, we still have God's self-appointed prophet ordering his army of barbaric thieves to pillage villages, killing every man, woman and child, but ironically some predominantly atheist countries in the modern world have finally achieved that sort of peaceful society [purported to be the product of a land governed under Mosaic law], with high education [and] very low crime, and the greatest threat to that comes from religious fundamentalists.
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... how many times... have they caught anti-gay advocates of "family values" cheating on their wives (often illegally) with prostitutes, on drugs, having gay sex or sharing a hotel room with a rent boy? It happens so often now that it's almost expected any time someone seems to protest too much.
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Every feature that is known to exist in every bird universally accepted as such is also found on dinosaurs: four-chambered heart, fused caudal vertebrae, gastroliths, even the avian respiratory system have all been found on fossil theropods, especially dromaeosaurs and maniraptors. You can distinguish birds among dinosaurs, but it is no longer possible to distinguish birds from dinosaurs.
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The Bible describes only the worst that a marriage can be, but never defines what a marriage should be.
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Now I would say that any honest earnest quest for truth must begin with the abandonment of faith. Are you prepared to lie in order to maintain your self-induced delusion? Or are you bold enough to question your own convictions and even test them to find out if they're true, and discard them if they are not? That's the rift. That's the difference between us.
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It doesn't matter what our out-dated, hate-filled, prejudicial doctrines and man-made mythologies might have said. There is no such thing as a 'religion of peace'. Religion only knows how to react violently because they don't understand reason and have never practiced tolerance. That's why secular humanist diplomats will be necessary in order to end wars and other violations of human rights.
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Unsupported assertions of impossible absurdities are indistinguishable from the illusions of delusion, and no one should believe anything that requires faith. Because faith requires that we believe without question, without reservation, without reason. That is irrational, foolish; that's what a fool is. Your Bible got it wrong. Any assertion that requires faith should be rejected for that reason.
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I'm gonna miss the old sith lord. He was the best pope atheists could hope for. He started out as a Hitler youth actually wearing a Nazi uniform. As a Cardinal, he famously conspired to conceal sex crimes against children for the sake of the church. As pope, he addressed an audience in an AIDS ravaged area of Africa, and told them that use of condoms actually increased risk of STDs. His objection to birth-control took precedence over human life. That is how evil he is.
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... back when nearly everyone in the Western World was ruled by religions touting these Commandments, it was a period of unparalleled tyranny and cruelty known as the Dark Ages. It was a time of thought police, when one could be killed simply for not believing what they were told. The first half [of the Ten Commandments] only serves to promote religion, with no benefit to humanity at all. Education, enlightenment and free inquiry are the key, not the forced conformity by those claiming authority from an imaginary being.
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Abiogenesis has a decent amount of evidence behind it, but nowhere near as much as evolution does. So far we still don't know which (if any) of the explanations posed for the origin of life is the most accurate one. But if there's one thing the wisdom of the ages has taught us, it is that simply not yet knowing the real explanation is no reason to go and blame anything on magic. Besides, even if a god did appear and summon the first life into being billions of years ago, there is no question but that life has certainly evolved since then, and is still evolving now.
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Who is this God? The god of the Jews? Those who say they're God's chosen people? And what of these Commandments? The covenant between God and Israel? And why only Israel? Because neither their God or their fables were ever intended for the whole of mankind. It is the folklore of one particular tribe of superstitious primitives and is meaningless to us in the here and now, especially since your God never even existed. So these laws were given by men after all.
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No matter what, creationists will not admit that anything we ever find can fulfill Darwin's prediction of transitional intermediates. This is why creationists demand only monstrous absurdities or issue challenges they know still couldn't be satisfied no matter how true evolution may be; because they know already that whatever they insist on seeing today we may show them tomorrow, and if that happens, they'll have to make up new excuses for why it still doesn't count. So they won't request to see anything evolution actually requires, and they usually won't define any criteria they would accept either, because they already know they won't accept anything even if we show them everything they ever ask for.
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If that were true [that the principles of the Ten Commandments brought about universal human rights, women's suffrage, the abolition of slavery and parliamentary democracy], then all this progress would have come about thousands of years ago, and not just in the last century or so. But each of the advances... cited were made only recently, after the Enlightenment and in spite of the Commandments, because those Commandments are authoritarian, not democratic; they allow special privileges for one race over all others, they permit and endorse slavery, and they treat women as property. So, for these unique achievements to have occurred at all, the Commandments would have to be ignored or discarded first.
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Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Aron Ra
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Born:
October 15, 1962
(age 61)
Bio:
L. Aron Nelson, known professionally as Aron Ra, is the Texas state director of the American Atheists, host of the Ra-Men Podcast, a public speaker, video producer, blogger, and vlogger.
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